Kill Decision

May 29, 2013

The shocking techno-thriller that cements Daniel Suarez’s status as the heir to Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy–a terrifying, breathtaking, and all-too-plausible vision of the world’s near future.

Unmanned weaponized drones already exist–they’re widely used by America in our war efforts in the Middle East. In Kill Decision, bestselling author Daniel Suarez takes that fact and the real science behind it one step further, with frightening results.

Linda McKinney is a myrmecologist, a scientist who studies the social structure of ants. Her academic career has left her entirely unprepared for the day her sophisticated research is conscripted by unknown forces to help run an unmanned–and thanks to her research, automated–drone army. Odin is the secretive Special Ops soldier with a unique insight into the faceless enemy who has begun to attack the American homeland with drones programmed to seek, identify, and execute targets without human intervention.

Together, McKinney and Odin must slow this advance long enough for the world to recognize its destructive power, because for thousands of years the “kill decision” during battle has remained in the hands of humans–and off-loading that responsibility to machines will bring unintended, possibly irreversible, consequences. But as forces even McKinney and Odin don’t understand begin to gather, and death rains down from above, it may already be too late to save humankind from destruction at the hands of our own technology.

Comments (1)

This sounds similar to the plot of “The Second Kind” by Philip K. Dick (one of the stories that the movie “The Terminator” was based on, in addition to Harlan Ellison’s “Soldier”). In that book, there is a detente formed by human-killing machines that surround human territories, like minefields. The machines are self-replicating to limited degrees because they are “self-maintaining.” This begins an “evolution of machines” and they eventually mimic humans, teddy bears, etc. Some very brutal imagery and writing.

But anyway: I’m probably going to buy and read this book, just because it looks cool.